At the start of September, The Sunday Times was lauding him as the man who'd "dug Anglo out of a hole". And by the end of it, Bloomberg was reporting that he'd been approached by BHP to enter the running to replace affable Scotsman Andrew Mackenzie as its next chief executive — not once, but twice! Cutifani, the report noted, had rebuffed the advances, in keeping with his previously stated intention to stay at Anglo until it completes a Peruvian copper project due to finish in 2022.

There hasn't been an Australian head of the Big Australian for almost two decades (even though, by making a valiant effort to stay on top of AFL news, Mackenzie surely counts as an honorary one). But if Cutifani was appointed to the role ahead of several competitive internal candidates — and we have no information to suggest he would be — we'd guess his reception wouldn't be uniformly laudatory Down Under.

At the tail-end of 2015, Cutifani unveiled plans to sell Anglo's Australian assets, as part of painful global downsizing forced by the group's crushing debts.

A mere year later, that strategy was dramatically dumped, as surging commodity prices made much of it unnecessary. The company did reduce its footprint and cut its costs, but far less than initially flagged. It ended up keeping many of the assets it had placed on the chopping block, including many in Australia. A massive strategic debacle, according to industry purists, who view shifting commodity prices as utterly expected and thus a poor basis on which to base long-term strategy in mining companies.

And the backflip didn't come cheap. In 2016, Anglo American shut down its Australian headquarters in Brisbane, at a cost of $63.5 million, which included redundancy costs for most of its white-collar staff. It then undertook a frantic re-hiring spree, necessitated by the fact that, as Cutifani admitted, the company had "lost some good people".

We'd guess many of such people, to this day, didn't appreciate being made redundant unnecessarily.